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Personas Demystified 1.0

This presentation aims to teach others how to use the user centered design methodology known as personas.

Personas are archetypes (models) that represent groups of real users who have similar behaviors, attitudes, and goals. A persona describes an archetypical user of software as it relates to the area of focus or domain you are designing for as a lens to highlight the relevant attitudes and the specific context associated with the area of work you are doing.

Personas Demystified 1.0

1.
Understanding
Your Users
Research: Developing Personas

2.
Before We Begin
We are going to talk about a design led project
that will aid in business and engineering efforts.

3.
Premise
We all have biases, assumptions, and perspectives.
Naturally, we all tend to build products that fulﬁll our
own preferences, desires, and ways of thinking.
We are not our users.
We need to design for them
and not for ourselves.
There are methods to ensure we create products tailor
made for the speciﬁc needs and goals of our users.

4.
Here in Silicon Valley, we forget how skewed our population
is, and we should frequently remind ourselves how abnormal
we really are. The average person who uses a software based
product around here isn't really very average. – Alan Cooper

5.
Q
A
Question
How can we build better software?
Answer
By better understanding our users.
But who are our users really?

7.
Problem
We have lots of users!
How can we possibly design for every one of them?

8.
If you design for everyone, you make no individual happy.
You can design for speciﬁc types of users.

9.
We determine what types of users we serve with research.
We analyze that research to ﬁnd segments of user types.
Each type of user is represented by a model called a persona.

10.
Persona noun pərˈsōnə
Personas are archetypes (models)
that represent groups of real users
who have similar attributes.
A persona encapsulates and
explains the most critical data
about users in a way that team
members can understand,
remember, and relate to.

11.
Persona
Each persona serves as a single
surrogate for many actual users,
which produces a clear target to
aim for.

12.
By designing for these personas, you can satisfy the
needs of the thousands or millions of potential users who
have similar characteristics and goals.

14.
PERSONAS ARE
USEFUL IF THEY
IM NOT IMPRESSED"
ARE CREATED WITH"
DIDN’T WE MAKE"
ETHNOGRAPHY.
PERSONAS BEFORE?

15.
Ethnography noun eTHˈnägrəfē
Ethnography informs design by
revealing a deep understanding of
people and how they make sense
of their world.
Ethnography is a research method
based on observing people in their
natural environment rather than in
a formal research setting.
When ethnography is applied to
design, it helps designers create
more compelling solutions.

16.
Uses
deﬁning and designing the product
communicating with stakeholders
about your audience
building consensus and
rallying a team around a goal
marketing the product
developing documentation
prioritizing bug ﬁxes

17.
Uses
Personas can be used for almost anything.
For the entire life cycle of product creation."
If you want to use user-centric methodology.

18.
What Personas Are Not
Market Segments
Stereotypes
Average Users
Roles

21.
What Personas Are Not
Roles
Example
Role: Surgeon
|
Behavior Types: Two"
1. focused on ensuring the longevity of the implant
2. focused on how quickly the surgery takes
A successful design must accommodate these two
distinct philosophies and approaches.

31.
The Plan All Phases
Setup
Leverage Existing Info
Prototyping
Primary Research
Synthesis
Presentation and Use

32.
Timing
How long will this process take?
Depends on many variables. This is difﬁcult to determine
and requires more research to ﬁgure this aspect out.

33.
Setup
1. Develop a team
Who will work together to create personas?
2. Determine Project Scope, milestones and deliverables
3. State Research Goals
What do you want to ﬁnd out? This will help you determine what methods to ﬁnd
answers to your questions. Also beneﬁcial is to determine how you will use the
personas. Ensure that personas don't just become an artifact, because the value
is so not in the artifact itself.

34.
Leverage Existing Info
1. Domain Knowledge
Primary research quality goes up when you have already researched the subject
matter and domain before hand. This knowledge will help you ask insightful
questions later on.
2. Existing External sources
Talk to Stakeholders and Subject Matter Experts - Leverage the knowledge of
others who know more then you do. What are the possible external sources of
data relevant to your domain, company, or product? Are there institutions or other
companies that might have conducted research related to your domain?
3. Existing Internal Sources
Who are the subject-matter experts in your company? Who has the most contact
with existing customers? Your support organization, sales force, and account
representatives can be great sources of information about your users.

35.
Prototyping
It’s recommend that you create provisional personas whether or not you plan to
collect ﬁrst-hand data about your target users."
!
• Help you target your ﬁeld research to validate (or contradict) current impressions of
who users are.
• Provide some practice with persona conception and gestation methods before you
need to create your “real” personas.
• Provisional personas are easy to create and help people understand why personas
are valuable
• Provisional personas can be the eye-opening catalyst that gets your team interested
in some real user research. When your assumptions are exposed, so are gaps in
your knowledge of your users. Ad hoc personas can lead your organization toward
more rigorous user-centered design (UCD) techniques.

36.
Primary Research
1. Identify likely roles
From stakeholder and subject matter expert discussions, you should be able to
develop an educated guess of the roles people who will use the product.
2. Determine the base number of interviewees per role
If the product or service is in a highly specialized industry with narrowly deﬁned
roles, assume you need a minimum of about four interviewees per role; this is
usually the minimum number to see a behavior pattern.!
!
4. Multiply sample size for important factors
Next, you may need to increase the sample size based on other factors that you
expect to cause BEHAVIORAL DIFFERENCES.
5. Trim the sample and incorporate other factors
Time and cost may become prohibitive when numbers get large. For most
projects, the optimal sample size turns out to be the base number of people per
role (usually 4 or 8) multiplied by your top one or two factors.
6. Adjust for no shows and poor interviews

39.
Synthesis
1. Divide interviewees by role, if appropriate
When the division between roles is very clear, its best to treat research
participants in each role as a separate group for the purpose of identifying
patterns. This is because large differences tend to obscure smaller differences.
Make sure to compare apples to apples, and not apples to oranges.
2. Identify behavioral and demographic variables
For each role, identify which aspects of BEHAVIOR and ATTITUDE seem to differ
across interviewees. Then add DEMOGRAPHIC information, as well as
ENVIRONMENTAL factors.
3. Map interviewees to variables
Place each interviewee relative to the others in each spectrum (and in the
appropriate multiple choice categories, if applicable).
4. Identify Patterns
Start by trying to ﬁnd two or more people who frequently appear together across
multiple variables. After this, try explaining and/or rationalizing why these variables
are related – this will help strengthen the patterns you ﬁnd.

40.
Synthesis
5. Deﬁne Goals
Goals are an integral part of personas. The level of speciﬁcity of goals is known as
END GOALS: aims the persona could accomplish, at least in part, by using the
product or service. Its typical to have 1-3 goals per persona.
6. Clarify distinctions and add detail
Patterns and goals are just the beginning; to become a real persona, you still
need to add details about BEHAVIOR, ATTITUDES, ENVIRONMENT, and others
to make the personas effective tools for design and communication.
Every user persona should incorporate a ‘day in the life’ description of current
behaviors relevant to the problems you are trying to solve.
Don’t insert a bunch of ﬁctitious details or needless ﬂuff.
7. Fill in other persona types as needed
Using the methods described previously.

41.
Presentation and Use
1. Develop the narrative and other communication
An effective description includes:!
• Name!
• Photo!
• Narrative!
- behaviors!
- frustrations!
- environment!
- skills and capabilities!
- feelings and attitudes!
- relationships!
- demographics!
- goals
2. Help others understand the personas as a set
In addition to helping everyone understand the personas as individuals you should
develop ways to communicate about them as a set that represents a range of
behaviors and needs.!

43.
Works Cited
some of the presentation was copied directly from the sources below but was also
remixed and altered by Shlomo ‘Mo’ Goltz ( www.sgoltz.com )
About Face 3 - Alan Cooper, Robert Reiman, and David Cronin!
An Enthographic Primer - AIGA!
Designing For the Digital Age - Kim Goodwin!
Interviewing Users - Steve Portigal!
The User is Always Right - Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar!
The Inmates are Running the Asylum - Alan Cooper!
Images are not given proper attribution but were found on google, ﬂickr, and the sources above.